Mehdi Hasan throws his toys out of the pram

Further to His Grace's post this morning on 'The ignorance, immaturity and hypocrisy of Mehdi Hasan', Mr Hasan has been spitting, frothing and fulminating all day, like a grounded teenager. And now he has thrown all of his toys out of the pram with this feeble ad hominem self-defence.

One wonders why the Editor and Proprietor of the New Statesman do not see this is an abuse of work equipment.

That aside, accordng to Mehdi Hasan, His Grace is an 'oddball right-wing blogger' with an 'inability to understand simple English'.

Intelligent comment, eh?

But he lays down this with his customary arrogance:

I pointed out that it was ridiculous for Douglas Murray to pretend (a) that multiculturalism is responsible for forced marriages, and (b) that I've yet to come across a single politician, community leader or religious spokesman who defends forced marriages or excuses them on the basis of "multiculturalism". It is just ridiculous and dishonest to make such a claim.

Note the 'I have yet to come across...' is followed swiftly with the absolute rejection '..ridiculous and dishonest...'. Seemingly, because he has yet to discover anyone who draws the correlation, it cannot exist.

Well, Mr Hasan, you have clearly not come across the Times report from December 2009 (hence freely available all over the internet), in which the highly respected campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera writes on the issue of forced marriage and a tragic 'honour killing':

While it is too late for Tulay Goren, I hope that the story of her
appalling and avoidable death will finally wake us up to the abuse taking
place in our midst and that we will stop trying to excuse forced marriage
as just a price to pay for multicultural diversity.

The whole article gives the lie to Mehdi Hasan's crass assertion that there are no (Asian) 'community leaders' who draw a correlation between forced/assisted marriages and multiculturalism.

This BBC report aptly illustrates the problems of multiculturalism that Jasvinder Sanghera talks about.

One wonders if Mehdi Hasan will apologise? Retract? Correct his blantantly erroneous assertion?

Or if he really is such an immature teenager that he'll just storm upstairs and slam his bedroom door firmly shut.